Novelist Marra visited Chechnya only after writing about it

By Georgia Rowe

Correspondent

Posted:
06/13/2013 12:00:00 AM PDT

Updated:
06/14/2013 01:34:39 PM PDT

For many writers starting a novel set abroad, a visit to the place is the first step. Anthony Marra took a different approach. With his debut novel, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," he wrote about Chechnya, and only then traveled to the Russian republic where two wars for independence have been waged.

Marra was still in college when he started writing the book, an intricate and affecting epic spanning those wars. It's an impressive debut by the 28-year-old author, who lives in Berkeley and is completing the second year of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

In an interview in Berkeley, Marra says he wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya when starting the book.

Author Anthony Marra, 28, of Berkeley, is photographed along College Avenue in Berkeley, Calif., on Friday, May 31, 2013. Marra, who grew up in Washington, D.C., recently wrote his first novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," which takes place in Chechnya. The book has been receiving many positive reviews. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
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JANE TYSKA
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Growing up in Washington, D.C., where his father is a lawyer for the Peace Corps, Marra was an undergraduate in St. Petersburg, Russia, studying the country's history and language, in 2006. Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who documented war crimes in Chechnya, had been recently assassinated in Moscow.

"I lived a couple of blocks away from this metro station that had become a gathering place for Russian veterans of the Chechen wars," Marra says. "I realized that Chechnya was this place that was very much in the air at the time -- and that, like many Americans, I didn't really know anything about it."

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He was astonished when he began reading histories and journalistic accounts of Chechnya. "There's a larger-than-life quality to its history," he says. "That area was a sort of rite of passage for many 19th century authors -- Tolstoy, Pushkin and others -- but when I began working on the novel, there was no fiction available in English about the recent Chechen wars."

His book, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" (he took its title from a term denoting "life," found in a Russian medical dictionary), takes place over five days in Chechnya's 2004 war, with flashbacks to the conflict of 1994. Its central characters are Sonia, a surgeon in a Chechen hospital, Akhmed, an incompetent doctor who becomes her unwilling assistant, and Havaa, a girl Akhmed rescues when her father is captured by Russians. The book has garnered strong reviews since its May release: The New York Times called it "ambitious and intellectually restless," and the Washington Post said it was "a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles."

Marra says he avoided a conventional war story: "I didn't want it to be about soldiers or rebels. I wanted to write about ordinary citizens, not particularly political or religious, who are caught in the crossfire."

The novel is filled with humorous touches, and portraits of ordinary people -- such as Dokka, a master chess player who has never lost a match; and Khassan, who has spent 40 years writing, and rewriting, the history of his homeland

Marra first visited Chechnya in 2012. He signed up for "The Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour." His guide was a Russian-Chechen woman who had studied tourism in Moscow. "She'd turned this war-torn area into an international tourist destination," he says, smiling.

Chechens have a wry sense of humor, as well as a love of American pop culture, he adds. "I would introduce myself as Tony Marra, and maybe one in three men would respond 'Tony Montana!' -- the character from 'Scarface.' But there's also respect for American religious freedom, and a sense that America is this natural geopolitical counterweight to Russia."

Today, he adds, Chechnya is relatively calm. Many Chechen rebels have fled to Dagestan, the republic directly to the east; Grozny, which the U.N. called the most devastated city on earth in 2003, has been rebuilt. "Things haven't completely settled," says Marra. "The day I flew back to America, two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a square where I'd spent some time. But you get a sense of stability -- that people are just so tired of violence that they don't care who's in charge as long as the electricity's on and there's water in the tap."

Asked if he had gotten Chechnya right before seeing it, Marra says he mostly had, with an exception: One scene in the book includes an escalator, and Marra learned the republic didn't get its first escalator until 2007. He deleted it from the final draft.

As a study of life in wartime, though, the book transcends history. "One of the ideas I found fascinating was that, in these sorts of conflicts, people who would never meet are jumbled together," Marra says. "A lot of the novel deals with this idea. It's structured as a constellation of characters, a map of those peculiar twists of coincidences and fate. This is something you can do very well in a novel, that no other medium can do quite as elegantly."

(Marra will discuss his book at 7:30 p.m., June 20, at Bookshop Santa Cruz; and at 7:30 p.m., July 12, at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park.)